For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.
The Justice Department, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Mr. Montgomery bamboozled federal officials.
These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your "friends" are.
Out here, there's a sisterhood of female journalists. Even if you'd never be best friends at home, there's a mutual respect among women who live with danger and discomfort to do their jobs. The attack on Lara Logan, a veteran of the world's war zones, was not just chilling but deeply, deeply sad.
A leaked manuscript by one of Sarah Palin's closest aides from her time as governor charges that Palin broke state election law in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign and was consumed by petty grievances up until she resigned.
The federal government DOES NOT fund Social Security! Social Security funds the federal government.
In Inside Job, the name that keeps cropping up is Larry Summers, a friend of President Bill Clinton and more recently Barack Obama. Summers exemplifies the links between cheerleaders in academia, Wall Street, supine regulators and an ignorant Capitol Hill that Ferguson stresses were at the root of the problem. It helps that Summers looks like a mafia boss, but the difficulties in making the case against him are shown by the need to explain financial products like credit default swaps and how securitisation was used by banks to increase their borrowing.
There never was an “Egyptian revolution,” but rather a behind-the-scenes military putsch by a junta of CIA puppet generals who evidently could not succeed in their goal of ousting Hosni Mubarak without the help of a heavy-duty ultimatum from Washington in the night between Thursday, February 10 and Friday, February 11, 2011. There is growing evidence that the threat in question involved the seizure or blocking of the Suez Canal, the Egyptian waterway which carries over 8% of all seaborne world trade, which the imperialists tried to grab back in 1956, and from which they would today like to exclude China, Iran, and Russia. As for Mubarak, there are strong indications that he was toppled by Washington and London because he opposed the current US-UK plan to organize a block of Sunni Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf states — under a US nuclear umbrella and shoulder to shoulder with Israel — for purposes of confrontation and war with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and their Shiite and radical allies.
As we approach the 8th anniversary of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, and having just passed the 20th anniversary of another, it's worth reflecting on what's been accomplished through two wars and the intervening sanctions that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright so famously approved of even at the cost of a half million children's lives.\The authors of "Erasing Iraq" interviewed Iraqis as far afield as Sweden and Australia: "Every Iraqi we spoke with reported similar events: houses bombed, possessions lost, children kidnapped, lives destroyed. 'Americans -- when they hear one shot -- even if it's like 10 kilometers away -- they'll just open fire on everything,' said Laith as he lit a cigarette with the small red heating coils warming his cramped two-room house in East Amman, Jordan." The authors did not mention it, but this experience has been reported by American soldiers who took part in it as well, including Ethan McCord:
The United States is mounting a "diplomatic surge" to end the war in Afghanistan even as military pressure is forcing Taliban insurgents to consider whether to break with al Qaeda, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday.
